Twitter Plays Twister As Dempsey Returns

Twitter’s revolving door has spun to let co-founder Jack Dorsey back in as his partner Evan Williams leaves to concentrate on starting-up another, unspecified venture.

Dorsey, the world’s first tweeter exactly five years ago, is taking up the role of head of product development. He tweeted: “Today I’m thrilled to get back to work at @Twitter leading product as executive chairman. And yes: leading @Square forevermore as CEO. #200%.”

Squaring Up To The Future Challenges

Start-up Square has been occupying Dorsey’s time. As CEO of the mobile card-payments company, he has been evangelising the uses of having a payment card scanner attached to a smartphone. The service is only available in the US, using a magnetic strip reader rather than “chip and PIN”, and applies a $0.15 and a 2.75% or 3.5% surcharge to each transaction dependent on whether the card is swiped or the number typed in on the keyboard.

In a lengthy blog, Williams fudged detailing his future plans: “As was reported in various places yesterday, I’ve decided to scale back my role at the company. (I’m still involved, but it’s no longer my full-time job). I’m not ready to talk about what I have planned next, but I will venture a prediction about what’s next for Twitter: it will be bigger and better.”

That job will be Dorsey’s challenge. Twitter is growing massively as new members enrol and tweet densities increase, so the company has to keep pace with the growing volumes of traffic, he said. He also explainedthat he wants to make the system navigation easier and improve the service for people who just use Twitter as get an information source and do not wish to send tweets themselves.

Williams, after praising Twitter and all who use it, revealed something of his future fears and hopes. Despite successfully helping to launch Google’s Blogger and Twitter, he is still overawed with what the future may hold: “While I doubt I’ll get so lucky a third time, as my good friend [and the third co-founder of Twitter] Biz Stone likes to say, ‘Creativity is a renewable resource’. Let’s see what happens.”